800 children buried in sewage tank

Tell us the truth about the
children dumped in
mass graves

Forget prayers. Only full disclosure by
Ireland's Catholic church can begin to
atone for the children who died in its
care

One of the former church-run Magdalene
laundries, where unmarried women and children
were incarcerated in Ireland
The bodies of 796 children, between
the ages of two days and nine years
old, have been found in a disused
sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway.
They died between 1925 and 1961 in a
mother and baby home under the care of
the Bon Secours nuns.
Locals have known about the grave since
1975, when two little boys, playing, broke
apart the concrete slab covering it and
discovered a tomb filled with small
skeletons. A parish priest said prayers at
the site, and it was sealed once more, the
number of bodies below unknown, their
names forgotten.
The Tuam historian Catherine Corless
discovered the extent of the mass grave
when she requested records of children's
deaths in the home. The registrar in
Galway gave her almost 800. Shocked,
she checked 100 of these against
graveyard burials, and found only one
little boy who had been returned to a
family plot. The vast majority of the
children's remains, it seemed, were in
the septic tank. Corless and a committee
have been working tirelessly to raise
money for a memorial that includes a
plaque bearing each child's name.

For those of you unfamiliar with how,
until the 1990s, Ireland dealt with
unmarried mothers and their children,
here it is: the women were incarcerated
in state-funded, church-run institutions
called mother and baby homes or
Magdalene asylums, where they worked
to atone for their sins. Their children
were taken from them.
According to Corless, death rates for
children in the Tuam mother and baby
home, and in similar institutions, were
four to five times that of the general
population. A health board report from
1944 on the Tuam home describes
emaciated, potbellied children, mentally
unwell mothers and appalling
overcrowding. But, as Corless points out,
this was no different to other homes in
Ireland. They all had the same mentality:
that these women and children should be
punished.
Ireland knows all this. We know about
the abuse women and children suffered
at the hands of the clergy, abuse funded
by a theocratic Irish state. What we
didn't know is that they threw dead
children into unmarked mass graves. But
we're inured to these revelations by now.
Corless expresses surprise that the media
were so slow to report her story , that
people didn't seem to care. If two
children were found in an unmarked
grave, she observes, it would be news;
what about 800? But what is the
difference between the wall of lies,
denial and secrecy the church
constructed to protect its paedophile
priests and a concrete slab over the
bodies of 796 children neglected to death
by nuns? Good people unearth these evil
truths, but the church always survives.
The archbishop of Tuam and the head of
the Irish Bon Secours sisters will soon
meet to discuss the memorial and service
planned at the site. The Bon Secours
sisters have donated what the Irish TV
station RTÉ describes as "a small sum" to
the children's graveyard committee.
Father Fintan Monaghan, secretary of the
Tuam archediocese , says: "I suppose we
can't really judge the past from our point
of view, from our lens. All we can do is
mark it appropriately and make sure
there is a suitable place here where
people can come and remember the
babies that died."
Let's not judge the past on our morals,
then, but on the morals of the time. Was
it OK, in mid-20th century Ireland, to
throw the bodies of dead children into
sewage tanks? Monaghan is really saying:
"don't judge the past at all". But we must
judge the past, because that is how we
learn from it.
Monaghan is correct that we need to
mark history appropriately. That's why I
am offering the following suggestions as
to what the church should do to in
response:
Do not say Catholic prayers over these
dead children. Don't insult those who
were in life despised and abused by you.
Instead, tell us where the rest of the
bodies are. There were homes
throughout Ireland, outrageous child
mortality rates in each. Were the Tuam
Bon Secours sisters an anomalous,
rebellious sect? Or were church practices
much the same the country over? If so,
how many died in each of these homes?
What are their names? Where are their
graves? We don't need more
platitudinous damage control, but the
truth about our history